The Bay area is a conglomeration of people searching for deeper purpose and meaning. On any given night, there are so many events happening on meetup, eventbrite, facebook and other social media sites that we get at times overwhelmed with how best to spend our time and the direction to turn our attention, both personally as well as in career.

In this article, I’m going to specifically focus on the competing voices within side yourself and our quest towards finding our own unique voice.

In our earliest years our beliefs, biases, filters, and preferences were all shaped my those closest to us. Every thought, every twitch, every flutter of our waking brain was set in accordance with the world around us. Our first few months of life, we hadn’t even the foggiest notion that our thoughts and identity was any other than that of our mother’s.

As we enter adulthood, so many of these same voices and beliefs still remain, hidden in the doorways of our subconscious. They have become so intricately woven into the fabric of our persona that it becomes difficult to differentiate the voice of others verses those of our own. Eventually, these voices may even begin to function as mini parts and personalities within side ourselves and at times may even have us feel segmented and confused.

For some of us, the voices may come in the parental form of telling us how we’re not Ok as we are and how we “should” be instead. “You should work forty hours a week,” “you should have a career,” “you should be married by now,” “you should own a house,” “you should….”

Other parts may act to protect us.

Regardless of who or where these competing voices and parts originated from, they may act to pull us out of our alignment and make career and life choices that we may have made otherwise. They act to weaken the direction that our ships wish to sail and the end goal it wishes to attain.

Perhaps we’re still listening to the voices of old, which speak to us about urgency and perfectionism. Perhaps they are the critical voices who find all sorts of reasons for why weare falling short and need to put more pressure onto ourself for being the way that we are.

As we reach post adolescence, it becomes even more crucial as we develop ourselves to discover the true nature of our own distinct voice. Whatever the voices are doing or saying, there may be value, for the truth of our identities, to parse out where and from whom these voices came from.

It’s as simple at looking at a conflict or decision and asking yourself, “who’s voice is that?” And then recognizing, “oh that sounds like my mother’s beliefs and voice.” For our subconscious doesn’t recognize any voice as being separate from our own.

One of the next steps to taking charge of these voices is to begin to include them as opposed to exclusion and pushing them away. It’s so often those people whom we’ve created energetic walls and barriers against (in resentment or resistance), whose unfortunate traits we’ll be the most prone to magnetize and repeat.

No matter how much we try to push away and avoid being anything like our mother and father, we’ll suddenly find ourselves being a parent ourselves and using the same actions or behaviors as our parents once did when trying to raise our own offspring. Or will find ourselves living out the same patterns, conflicts and tragedies of our same sex parent. Living with an avoidant or absent partner, facing financial hardships, being a single mom, etc.

Of course you won’t have 100% of the same circumstances and conflicts, yet just enough. .

In childhood, we created our own rule books of how we “should” act and behave in the world in order to receive the love and approval from mom or dad and avoid disapproval. Perhaps we learned that we “should” take care of mom because mom was at times helpless or weak, or perhaps we learned that we needed to work harder and excel to receive dad’s approval. As we get older, for most of us, these rule books and “shoulds” are no longer appropriate. We have outgrown them.

We may at times have thoughts like “we should be on time for work,” or “we should keep our promises.” Most everyone has some spectrum of obligation of the sort. Yet the issue becomes when the should’s have a catalytic trigger upon you that has a negative impact upon your body’s physiologic state. Causing the back of your throat to tighten and your body to contract with just the mere thought of them.

As we evolve our consciousness and get more and more aligned with our truth, it will get easier to decipher the energy and voices of others vs. our own. It’s then that you can begin to take charge of who’s really running the show. The show of your life that is.

With practice you can begin to recognize the different voices from one another and discern who’s voice has your best interest at heart and each of these parts intended positive motive. Knowing that all these parts are all a part of you, the only next option is integration. For integration will allow you to feed the needs of each of the individual parts, which in the end will give you all the power you need to live. It’ll give you the power to claim whose voice to listen to, and which voices to dim.

Once you parse out whose voices are speaking in your head, it’s time to integrate all your voices. True alignment comes when all the different voices and parts of yourself see the end goal and work together to getting there. In the end, although these voices may have originated throughout socialization, in the end they’re all still your voice.

You were ONE when your were born and your journey through life is one of reunification.